Well, if you follow the news, right now almost every country in Latin America is on some kind of situation with political unrests or stuff like that. Most of them, I cant really talk about in any more detail than just generalities. Venezuela, on the other hand, I can.
For example, one of the best international successes of the “revolution” was to control the narrative of how the country and its history was understood outside Venezuela. Because all that crap about “oligarchs”… well… is crap.
The country, for decades, was a democracy that was run more or less on social democratic principles. The main party was social democratic, and the other big party was in theory christian democrats but in practice their policies were very much social democratic.
And in the beginning it worked very well. And then they got the first big oil boom, became crazy and corrupt and drove the country to the ground in the 80s-90s.
But again, all that was under democratic governments of a social democratic leaning. Some noises were made toward “liberalization” in the 80s-90s crisis but that was basically just your standard I need money from the IMF thing.
Public education? Already there before Chávez. Nationalization of oil and other resources? Done in the 70’s, not by Chávez. Etc, etc, etc.
But as the image of a standard Latin American country is “filthy rich owners exploiting the peasants”, well, thats what they sold internally and abroad. A view that doesnt fit Venezuela since … well, probably the 30s. What we got was the discredit of democracy due to the traditional parties losing themselves into an orgy of corruption and mismanagement. And then the election of some messianic outsider antipolitician that proceeded to double down on all that.
We got our Trump way before US got Trump, only ours was an idiot from the military and from the left.
